Release: Amazon EC2 on 2011-08-24

Amazon EC2 VM Import Support for for Windows 2003 and VHD file format.

Release Date: August 24, 2011
Latest Version: 2011-07-15
Created On: August 25, 2011
Last Updated: October 09, 2017

New Features

Feature Description
Support for VHD file format VM Import can now import virtual machine image files in VHD format. The VHD file format is compatible with the Citrix Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization platforms. VM Import now supports RAW, VHD and VMDK (VMware ESX-compatible) image formats. For more information, see Using the Command Line Tools to Import Your Virtual Machine to Amazon EC2 in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 VM Import now supports Windows Server 2003 (R2). With this addition, VM Import supports all versions of Microsoft Windows Server supported by Amazon EC2.
New version of Amazon EC2 command line tools To take advantage of the new VM Import features, install the latest version of the Amazon EC2 command line tools from Amazon EC2 API Tools.

Known Issues

Issue Description
Limitations with VMs imported from Citrix Xen Virtual machines that have the Citrix Tools for Virtual Machines installed cannot be imported using VM Import. Use the Citrix XenCenter console to remove the tools before importing the instance into Amazon EC2. For more information, see Exporting from Citrix in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.
VMs with more than one virtual disk not supported Importing virtual machines with more than one virtual disk is not supported. We suggest that you import the VM with only the boot volume, and import any additional disks using the ImportVolume API command or ec2-import-volume in the command line. After the import volume task completes, use the AttachVolume API command or ec2-attach-volume in the command line to associate the additional volumes with your instance. For more information about the API commands, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference. For more information about the command line, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Command Line Reference.
Current Limitations for VM Import

The following types of images currently cannot be imported into Amazon EC2:

  • Encrypted, compressed, or read-only images
  • Started or suspended images
  • Linked clones
  • Images with multiple virtual disks

When you import a disk image to an Amazon EC2 instance, the instance appears in the AWS Management Console before the conversion process finishes. To determine when the process is complete and the instance is available to use, use the ec2-describe-conversion-tasks command.